Don’t take this with a grain of salt. If we take him at his word and follow his example, we have to be a holy nuisance and annoy the [you-know-what] out of people. Literally.

Yesterday, Pope Francis made it clear. He wants You to be a troublemaker too.

Read on… (From CNA/EWTN News:)

“If we annoy people, blessed be the Lord,” said Pope Francis during his morning Mass at the Vatican on May 16.

“We can ask the Holy Spirit to give us all this apostolic fervor and to give us the grace to be annoying when things are too quiet in the Church,” he said at the chapel of the Saint Martha residence, where he lives.

He celebrated the Mass alongside Cardinal Peter Turkson and Bishop Mario Toso, the president and the secretary of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace.

Council staff and employees from Vatican Radio were among those attending the Eucharistic celebration.

The Pope preached on today’s first reading from Acts 22 and contrasted “backseat Christians” with those who have apostolic zeal.

“There are those who are well mannered, who do everything well, but are unable to bring people to the Church through proclamation and apostolic zeal,” he stated.

The pontiff said apostolic zeal “implies an element of madness,” which he labeled as “healthy” and “spiritual.”

He added that it “can only be understood in an atmosphere of love” and that it is not an “enthusiasm for power and possession.”

Pope Francis also dwelt on St. Paul’s actions in the reading from Acts.

“Paul, in preaching of the Lord, was a nuisance, but he had deep within him that most Christian of attitudes, apostolic zeal,” he stated.

“He was not a man of compromise, no!” he exclaimed. “The truth, forward! The proclamation of Jesus Christ, forward!”

The Pope noted that St. Paul’s fate was one “with many crosses, but he keeps going, he looks to the Lord and keeps going.”

“He is a man who, with his preaching, his work, his attitude irritates others, because testifying to Jesus Christ and the proclamation of Jesus Christ makes us uncomfortable.

Paul did not find and encounter Jesus Christ with an intellectual or scientific knowledge, but with “that first knowledge of the heart and of a personal encounter.”

According to the Pope, St. Paul was a “fiery” individual who was always in trouble, “not in trouble for troubles’ sake, but for Jesus” because “proclaiming Jesus is the consequence.”

“The Church has so much need of this, not only in distant lands, in the young churches, among people who do not know Jesus Christ, but here in the cities, in our cities, they need this proclamation of Jesus Christ,” Pope Francis stressed.

“So let us ask the Holy Spirit for this grace of apostolic zeal, let’s be Christians with apostolic zeal, onwards, as the Lord says to Paul, take courage!” he exclaimed.

To sum it all up: Blessed are the Troublemakers; they will set the world on fire for the Kingdom of God!

Two months into his pontificate, we have come to expect this sort of
thing from our new Pontiff. His personal style is straightforward and
homespun. He speaks simply, and has an knack for expressing lofty ideas
in earthy images.

Just yesterday, for example, the Holy Fathertold religious superiors
that women living in consecrated life should be “mothers and not
spinsters.” In a still more noteworthy line, a few weeks earlier, he had
told the pastors of Rome that they should be “shepherds who have the
smell of their sheep.”

What a wonderful, vivid image! The Pope could have said that priests
should mingle with their people, should learn all about the lives and
loves, the cares and concerns, of the people in their parishes. But “the
smell of their sheep” conveys the same idea much more powerfully.

Take another example of the Pope’s approach: his decision not to distribute Communion when he celebrates Mass in public.
Many Catholic prelates have worried about the confusion that might be
created if they administered the Eucharist to a Catholic whose public
actions have caused scandal. Thousands of words have been written about
whether Catholic politicians who support legal abortion should be denied
Communion. Pope Francis has not entered directly into that debate, but
he has found a practical way to avoid furthering scandal. No renegade
Catholic will be able to exploit a “photo op” with this Pontiff.

When I began reading about our new Pope, before working on my own book about his life and the prospects for his pontificate,
I quickly recognized that this was a man who deals in concrete facts
rather than abstractions, who prefers to deal with people rather than
ideas. He has not written books. He has avoided interviews. He has not
hatched ambitious plans. He has not founded think-tanks. He has not made
world tours, giving speeches in different cities. He has not called
press conferences to issue major statements on social affairs. In short
he has not done the things that ordinarily bring a cleric to public
prominence. Yet somehow he has been chosen to occupy the world’s most
prominent post.

How did that happen? How did the cardinal-electors settle on this
simple, unassuming prelate as the successor to St. Peter? I suspect they
recognized Cardinal Bergoglio as an unusually gifted pastor. I think
they noticed—although few cardinals would have expressed it in these
terms—that he had the “smell of his sheep.””Follow a fat Pope with a
thin Pope,” runs the old Roman adage. The Pontiff’s physical girth is
not important, of course, but the mixture of personal characteristics
is. So now, after two Pontiffs with extraordinary scholarly credentials,
we have a Pope who has no pretensions to intellectual status. After two
Pontiffs who were active participants in the Second Vatican Council,
anxious to help us understand the Council’s teachings, we have a Pontiff
who was ordained to the priesthood after the Council, and has spent his
entire ministry putting those teachings into practice. After two great
theorists we have a practical tactician. As I wrote in A Call to Serve:

Pope Francis no longer needs to explain the teachings of the
Council. That work has been admirably done by his two predecessors, who
have left a body of teaching that will take many years to digest. The
challenge now is to put the teaching into practice. Vatican II
proclaimed the “age of the laity,” and reminded the faithful that all
Catholics share equally in the responsibility to proclaim the faith. It
falls to Pope Francis to rally the faithful in that great effort. One
might almost say that John Paul II and Benedict XVI wrote the textbook
on Vatican II, and Francis is producing the “how-to” manual.

In saying that these three Pontiffs have different talents, I do not
mean to suggest that one is better than the others. Each Pope has
different strengths; each responds to the challenges of a particular
time. The needs of the Church today are not the same as they were in
1978 or 2005. The Holy Spirit chooses the man for the hour.

Some Catholics, I realize, are uncomfortable with a Pope who speaks
in such plain, unsophisticated language. But Jesus filled the Gospels
with images of farmers and fishermen, shepherds and vine-dressers. The
Lord spoke to ordinary people in their ordinary language. There are
always some people who fear that the Pope might “lower himself” to speak
with people below his station, just as the Pharisees were troubled that
Jesus dined with publicans.

The public style of Pope Francis is something new to the Catholic
world, and for now its novelty captures attention. Whether it will be
equally effective as the novelty wears off, remains to be seen. For now,
let’s enjoy a refreshing new approach.